Night of Unrest
by corellian-smuggler
Summary: Celebrations of a certain Corellian holiday affect Leia in unanticipated ways, and Han ends up with a visitor late at night…


_**AN:** This is a little Halloween/ Day of the Dead inspired fic that I posted on tumblr and belatedly decided that ffnet might also appreciate. It was mostly just for fun, and an effort to add a kind of spooky element to the galaxy far, far away in honor of Halloween, but it got kind of serious as I went along and as it references my other fics, I decided to include it in the same universe as The Incident. Hope you guys like it :) xoxo Erin_

Night of Unrest

Leia lay curled up in bed, her bedcovers tugged up past her neck, knees tucked against her chest. Her entire body felt cold, numb and empty, and her ribcage felt too tight for breath. It was how she'd felt all day: cold and suffocated, but also—also, she'd felt horribly sick. Sick all day, at least that's what she'd told Luke. Of course he probably didn't believe it, but Leia certainly hadn't been willing to divulge the truth. The truth was that she'd felt haunted—nauseous and on edge all day long, cold shivers shuddering down her spine and hot, bubbling guilt burning in her stomach. She'd barely been able to walk around base and maintain some semblance of composure, and it had only gotten worse as the morning had progressed into afternoon, and then evening, and then night.

It was silly, really. That's what she'd told herself and anyone who asked her. A silly Corellian superstition. The Corellians—since when were there so many damn Corellians on base?—naturally disagreed. To them, the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month of the Old Corellian Calendar was more than a silly superstition, more than just a holiday, no matter how commercialized it had become in some parts of the galaxy. The Night of Unrest, they said adamantly. The day when the barriers between the two realms—those of the living and of the dead—were broken, and souls that hadn't found peace could return to the physical plane. She'd heard Wedge explaining that very seriously to Luke, who'd never heard of the holiday on Tatooine, though she suspected that the pilot might have been purposefully trying to make his friend uneasy. Leia knew for a fact that it hadn't worked, because Luke had told her later that it didn't surprise him at all, that those who die become part of the Force, which penetrates every living thing, and so naturally the life forces of the dead linger, and he believed it was possible for them to make contact with living beings. He didn't mention, though Leia knew, that her friend believed he'd heard Obi-Wan Kenobi's voice call out to him on more than one occasion.

So it seemed that Luke was eagerly drawn into the revelry as pilots hung black "veils" across doorways in the barracks (white sheets dunked in paint and bolted to the door frames). On Corellia Leia knew that the children all dressed up as ghosts and ran through the streets gleefully, until they rested unsettled and nervous in their beds at night, wondering if some departed ancestor would step through the black veils after nightfall. While some of the Corellians were adamant that such a thing would truly happen, most of the base was just happy for an excuse to get drunk and "decorate."

And so Leia had been outnumbered and overruled. The veils had been authorized before she knew what had hit her, and her quiet appeals to Rieekan that they were a safety hazard had been calmly dismissed—they were just sheets, after all, and the celebration was good for morale, if in a slightly macabre way. The general had then offered her a look of sympathy and compassion that Leia had brushed off automatically, and all day the black sheets had loomed menacingly in her peripheral vision. Rogue Squadron had even draped veils over their X-wings, and all Leia's adamant, furious self-assurances that foolish Corellian superstitions meant _nothing nothing nothing_ still didn't keep the icy shudders at bay when she heard the rebels murmuring about vengeful souls and spirits ripped too soon from life—departed life forms returning from wherever it was they resided, having found no peace in death. It was all she could do not to curl into the fetal position at her post and cover her ears or scream into her knuckles, and the fact that to half the base's personnel the holiday was all one giant amusement made her physically ill.

And so, after an unbearably tense, over-long day, she lay finally, finally alone in her quarters with a bottle of sleeping pills and the privacy to weep, if she needed to. It had taken a few hours to actually take a pill, because a large part of Leia felt she didn't deserve a peaceful night's sleep, anyway. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Alderaan obliterated through a viewport. Her every breath seemed a punctuated echo of the overwhelming agony she'd felt—it was as though she'd heard the screams—billions of them, and not only had she heard them, but Leia had seemed to feel them, too, in her blood and in her chest. _Vengeful spirits. Souls ripped from the world_. All of Alderaan had been ripped from the world, and it was her fault. _Hers_. She thought of her mother and father stepping from behind a black veil, ghostly pale and insubstantial, their kind features distorted by death and grief and blame—thought of all the souls of Alderaan who would have been alive still if she hadn't seized the plans to the Death Star, or if she hadn't been caught, or if she hadn't been weak. She didn't need the Night of Unrest, for she was haunted every day and night, but now it was impossibly worse, and that was when she'd finally swallowed one of the pills that she'd been stubbornly neglecting for months.

Cold, cold, she was so cold. So cold that perhaps it was she who straddled the threshold between the concrete and the supernatural, when all the galaxy, on that thirteenth day, became some mystic, liminal space. _You may fire when ready. You are far too trusting. Your people depend on you, Lelila. There is no room for error. I will not fail you, father. You may fire when ready._

 _Leia lay on her back on a cold metal surface. Her cell. Darth Vader stood to one side, a hulking, looming mass, and Tarkin—skeletal and sinister—to the other. They were pouring scarlet liquid onto her face, and she was drowning in it. Blood, she knew. Somehow, she knew it to be her father's blood, her mother's blood, the blood of Alderaan, and it was tainted by Tarkin's laughter and Vader's breathing and her own despicable failure. She choked, sputtering, as it was poured down her throat, and she heard her mother screaming for her, screaming her name. She thrashed, fighting the restraints that kept her to the table, gurgling on the blood, and Alderaan was exploding over and over again. Then it all changed; she was running through the summer palace, but all of the rooms were empty and her voice echoed in the cavernous halls as she shouted for her family, knowing all the while that no amount of screaming could have ever saved them. Outside the tall windows the cloudless sky grew red, and the screams screams screams—Leia was in a crowd, surrounded by groping hands and angry faces. People clawed at her face and her braids and her sleeves, screaming that she had murdered Alderaan, that she had placed her rebellion above the safety of her people, that she had risked their lives and killed their children and their planet and their culture. Leia crouched on the ground, crying, begging forgiveness as they tore her hair and gouged her skin. It wasn't her fault, she wept, she'd only been doing what she'd thought was right, but still the crowd mauled her. She was on the Death Star, and her ears were ringing, and through the viewport the rocky remains of her home swirled like motes of dust in beams of light…_

 _Gasping, Leia bolted upright in her bed, chest heaving in the wake of her nightmare. She drew in a shuddering breath, her heart racing, and was just about to reach for the water sitting on her bedside table when there, at the foot of her cot, both a part of and yet distinct from the shadows, a man was standing. Leia's mouth opened in a cry that she could not utter as she beheld, with her waking eyes, the face of Bail Organa, solemn and staring and sad, and she—_

Leia hit the floor with a crash. The pain was a solid shock, radiating all down her spine as she continued to flail her arms and legs in a disoriented, desperate panic. Finally, she got her bearings. She was tangled in her blankets on the cold floor. Trembling from head to toe, Leia rubbed frantically at her eyes, hoping to clear the sleep from her clouded vision, for the room seemed impossibly dark. As she scrubbed her knuckles against her eyelids she discovered, with a jolt, that her cheeks were wet with tears, and her shivering she realized was due in part to the fact that she was drenched entirely in an ice-cold sweat. Heart still pounding, Leia scrambled to get off the floor. Her nerves returned instantaneously. It had been months since she'd had a nightmare so physical that she'd thrown her body from her cot, and…

And why was it so dark? Finally extracting her legs from the mess of sheets, she stood unsteadily and groped blindly for the panel that activated the lights. Her fingers found the cold metal, but the lights were not activated. Nothing. The room remained pitch-black.

Every hair on Leia's body stood on end. Was the power out? And if the lights weren't working, would that mean that her door would not open, either? Was she trapped in the tiny space of her quarters? A wave of icy panic hit her like a blow to the stomach. Her own breathing grew louder as her discomfort grew, until the heaviness of the darkness all around her became unbearable against her eyes. Every black shape was the ghost of her father, and her own shuddering breaths echoed in her ears in the dark, close space like the rattling of apparatus-facilitated exhalations filtered through a mask…

Leia didn't make a decision; her body moved on its own. One moment she stood, paralyzed, by her bed, the next she was darting to the door and slamming her palm blindly against the release. With a hiss that was deafening in the silence, the door slid open. The sight she was met with was hardly any better than the utter darkness of her quarters. The corridor was eerily dim, lit only by a small red emergency light illuminated at the far end of the hall—not enough to provide any real light, just enough to guide personnel to the exit and, unfortunately, enough to throw the black veils strung up in the doorways into relief. She could make them out even in the dark, their blackness more absolute than the walls of the corridor, and this combined with the lingering effects of her nightmare and the knowledge that half the base was convinced the veils served as portals between the worlds sent a spike of raw fear into her gut so powerful that, without a moment's pause, she was scampering down the hall and sprinting around the corner.

Leia's socks slipped on the metal floor plates as she skidded past ghostly black silhouettes. The entire west block, it seemed, was dark and deserted. Leia skittered past the mess hall and made a beeline for Hangar 4. She was certain that there was no one behind her, and yet some primal instinct told her to flee as though she were being chased, and she ran faster as every black veil she passed stirred in the disturbed air and seemed to come alive with some spirit newly returned to her dimension. In some corner of her mind she recalled sprinting to her parents' chambers as a small child afraid in the night, and just as she ran then with blind fear seeking the refuge of her mother's arms, so did she run with terrified determination past the ominous figures of the black-draped X-wings, and she did not stop until she was skidding to a stop before the Millennium Falcon. The ramp was up and there were no lights on in the cockpit, but Leia knew the code and so with adrenaline-fraught fingers she punched the keys on the illuminated pad and waited with her heart thundering against her ribs as the ramp slowly cranked down towards her. Before it had fully hit the ground she was sprinting into the darkness of the ship and fumbling with the code for the second time until, at last, the ramp was sealed behind her and she was secured safely on board. Gasping for breath in the dark, Leia almost collapsed in relief against the bulkhead.

"What the fuck—?"

A massive figure collided full-force with her back, and Leia practically shrieked. There was an instant of grappling, flailing limbs, and then a howl, and then the lights came on.

"What—Leia?"

It was Han. _Of course_ it was Han. It was Han's damn ship that she had essentially broken into, and she felt immediately foolish for having screamed. She opened her mouth to speak, to explain why she had entered the Falcon in the middle of the night with no warning and no invitation, but her words died in her throat, and Han stood positively gaping at her. He was, she saw with a start, in his underwear, clad only in a pair of snug boxer briefs that hugged his thighs and rode low on his hips, and all the rest of his bronzed, bare skin was there two feet away from her face. Suddenly Leia became aware of her own appearance, body literally soaked with sweat, thin undershirt and leggings clinging to her damp skin, and her face at the very least flushed from her mad dash across base and at the worst, streaked with tears. Self-consciously she crossed her arms over her chest, realizing just how absurd her behavior was.

"Leia? Are you alright?"

Leia took a step backward, hoping to discreetly swipe her fingers over her cheeks.

"Yes—of course. I'm so sorry, I… I didn't mean to wake you…"

She was studiously avoiding his gaze, and all the rest of his mostly-naked body, but she saw his eyebrows rise on his forehead in her peripheral vision.

"You didn't think lowering the ramp at 0300 would wake us up?" Han asked in disbelief, and a whuff from somewhere behind him drew her eyes, for the first time, to Chewbacca, who she realized must have been the one to turn on the lights.

Blushing furiously, Leia shrugged. Goddess, they probably thought she was out of her mind. Maybe she _was_ out of her mind. She'd had a nightmare and essentially run crying through a military facility in the middle of the night, after all.

"The power is out in the officers' barracks… In the whole west block, actually, and I…" She let the words fade uselessly, for she knew that there was no possible way she could justify her presence without admitting that she was, at the very least, afraid of the dark.

"One of the generators blew," Han told her, still seemingly shocked that she stood before him. He stared at her, the green of his eyes boring into her face so that she was left fidgeting and anxious, unable for once to conjure the mask of cool indifference and calm that was usually her armor in such moments of vulnerability.

"Chewie, go back to bed," Han sighed at last, gesturing with one hand. He waited wordlessly while the wookiee growled a 'goodnight' and retreated, and only then did he fix her again with that intense, scrutinizing look. Leia stared right back, and he closed the distance between them to touch her arm.

"You alright?"

His voice, still gruff and raspy with sleep, held an unquestionable note of concern that gave her pause and had her cheeks back to burning. Han hardly ever spoke to her like that, and if it weren't for the absolute sincerity in his expression she might have worried he was just luring her into some trap to mock and tease her.

Leia nodded, but Han frowned.

"Bad dream?" he asked in a low, gruff voice. Leia clenched her jaw. Ever since the catastrophic night when she'd gotten drunk and told Han about her nightmares, she felt like he'd been able to see right through her. He never mentioned anything she'd told him, and it hadn't stopped his provoking her and arguing with her and snapping at her, but something in the way he'd taken to wordlessly setting hot cups of caf down in front of her after she'd had a particularly hard night, and the constant excuses he'd been finding to invite her to sleep on the Falcon betrayed his new mindset.

Leia chaffed against the bizarre, unacknowledged caring, feeling simultaneously defensive and weak, hating that he knew how badly she was struggling. A deeper, more private part of her, however, identified the deeper problem. How could she continue to deny her own growing feelings for him if he began to treat her with care? The very fact that he hadn't mentioned it, even, seemed to stem from his own attempts to help her maintain her pride, and thoughts such as those kept her up late into the night just as often as her nightmares woke her.

"Can I sleep in the crew quarters?" she asked in a whisper, not bothering to answer his question. He already knew the answer.

Han nodded and strode easily through to the main hold.

"Take a seat," he told her, pointing to the holochess table as he disappeared deeper into the ship.

Still shivering, Leia, for once, did as he bid. Now that she was so far removed from her nightmare and from those cursed black sheets, she was both exhausted and chagrined by her own lack of control. Her limbs trembled uncontrollably, a combination of residual adrenaline and her icy clothes, she presumed, and every moment spent awaiting Han's return augmented, somehow, both her shame and her relief simultaneously.

"Here," he called as he ambled back into the main hold. He tossed a ball of grey fabric at her, and Leia was so caught off guard that she'd hardly managed to catch it before getting hit in the face. It was a faded shirt, soft and worn and clearly Han's, and Leia frowned up at him as he set a chipped mug before her on the table.

"You can sleep in that," he muttered, in a clearly forced tone of nonchalance.

"Oh, thank you, but—"

"You're soaked," he cut in. Something about the way he averted his eyes to his own mug as he spoke stopped the protest in her throat, and so with a reluctant nod, Leia set the shirt aside. It would be better than her damp undershirt, in any case, even if it would smell like Han and even if the implications of it stirred something in her belly just to think…

"Figured caf's not the best for the middle of the night, and I don't have any of that herb stuff you drink, so…"

Surprised, Leia glanced down at the mug—her mug, as it was, because he always gave her the same mug—and saw that he'd made her hot chocolate. It was her favorite, and she knew that he knew it. Knew that he'd started stocking his tiny galley with it ever since their first mission together, when she'd all but cried to drink it for the first time since… since before.

"This is better than tea, anyways," Leia assured him softly, lifting the chipped ceramic to her lips and taking a careful sip. For several long minutes neither of them spoke, and Leia kept catching herself staring at him. He'd slipped on a pair of loose-fitting pants when he'd retrieved the shirt for her, but he was still bare-chested as he held his own mug sturdily by the handle and drank. His hair—normally tousled—was practically a disaster, and Leia was unspeakably endeared by it. As the months had passed since the Battle of Yavin, she'd been more frequently endeared than annoyed by him, but those warm, aching feelings raised her hackles even more than his maddening arrogance… She was feeling both dejected and angry to discover she rather liked how he looked fresh from his bunk, jaw rough with stubble and eyes soft. Self-consciously she attempted to smooth her destroyed braids.

"You wanna talk about it?" Han asked at length, still taking slow swallows of cocoa. "You're already here, and I already know half of it, so you might as well, Princess."

Did she want to talk about it? Leia opened her mouth, and then closed it again. _No_ , was her immediate, knee-jerk response. No, she would _not_ talk about it. But, then… It was eating her alive, to keep all her grief inside, to shoulder her burdens all alone. The months of hiding and acting and pretending… And she'd already… Well, hadn't she already wept in Han's arms? Sobbed into his chest as he'd rocked her drunken body back and forth and listened to her confessions? He was right. He already knew about her nightmares, already knew all about her sleepless nights and tortured days, and maybe, just once…

"I… I think that the holiday might have…" she mumbled into her hot chocolate. She'd tried to sound matter-of-fact, to hide just how uncomfortable she was and match his casual logic, but the words sounded too small and uncertain as they left her mouth.

"What, all the Night of Unrest crap? Aw, c'mon Princess, don't let that dumb shit bother you," he told her earnestly. His eyebrows had drawn together as he spoke, and Leia set her mug aside.

"You don't believe in… spirits?" she asked hesitantly. It was the closest she was willing to get to the subject of her nightmare, and as generic a question as she'd thought it was, she hadn't taken into account how perceptive Han was. It was clear as he looked at her then that he'd made the connection between the holiday, and the veils, and Alderaan at once, and she felt positively transparent when he spoke.

"I don't know about that," he said, in a rare moment of seriousness. She couldn't look away from him. "But I do know that if there are spirits out there, they're not gonna come parading around in front of us like clockwork once a year just because someone decided thousands of years ago that thirteen's an unlucky number."

Leia swallowed thickly, looking back down at her drink.

"I don't think so either," she muttered, shrugging and fiddling with the handle of her mug. "I just… Everyone talking about it, today…" She drew in a shuddering breath. "It didn't help much with my… I didn't sleep very well."

She finished the rest of her hot chocolate.

"I'm sorry for waking you… I guess I wasn't thinking very far ahead…"

Han shook his head.

"Don't worry 'bout it. I was already kind of awake, anyways." He offered her a softer version of his cocky grin. "So, what happened? You got spooked and ran straight to the Falcon, huh?"

Leia shook her head, and offered him a tolerant grin.

"I'm sure I'll never live it down," she sighed, though secretly a part of her thrilled to see his satisfaction.

"Not a chance," he agreed.

For a moment they were quiet, just looking at each other. Han cleared his throat.

"Next year I'll leave the ramp down for you."

Leia's eyebrows shot up.

"Next year? I was under the impression that you were still planning to leave…"

Han opened his mouth, startled, and then shrugged and rubbed uncomfortably at the back of his neck. This was the part of the conversation where they would ordinarily have started to argue, and in fact nothing got them going as surely as talk of Han's uncertain future with the rebellion, but instead Han simply looked over at her and held her gaze.

"Plans change," he said quietly.

XXX

When they'd finished their drinks and deposited their mugs in the galley, Han walked Leia to the crew quarters. They stood in the threshold, eyeing one another uncertainly. Leia felt oddly hot, and the tingles in her spine were entirely unlike the ones that had plagued her during the day.

"You sure you wanna sleep in there?" Han asked gruffly. "You'd be more comfortable in my bunk."

Leia flushed down to her toes, taken aback.

"I… I probably won't fall back asleep for a while—I… I wouldn't want to keep you up any longer…"

Han visibly started, and at once, Leia realized that she'd entirely misunderstood his offer. She floundered for words, her entire face on fire, but it was too late. Han's surprise quickly became a huge grin, and then an infuriating smirk.

"I meant that _I'd_ sleep in the crew quarters, Sweetheart," he whispered conspiratorially. "But if you actually just considered sharing my bunk with me, I promise, you can keep me up as long as you want."

"You're insufferable," Leia hissed, mortified by her own assumption. Mortified by her own _answer,_ and uncertain of what to make of it.

Han chuckled and leaned against the bulkhead, and the movement brought their faces closer together. His laugh faded, and Leia suddenly couldn't move. She gazed up at him, his strong features shadowed in the semi-darkness, the heat of his bare torso noticeable even from where she stood. As he gazed down at her, eyes no longer teasing but dark and hot, Leia felt…

She felt tempted. She felt like she wanted to take him up on his offer and follow him to his cabin. Or worse: stretch up on her toes, and press her lips to whatever part of him she could reach…

"Maybe next year," Han whispered, with obvious longing. Leia closed her eyes against a sudden, fierce ache. _Maybe next year._ She was beginning to think there was no 'maybe' at all, that there was only one definite outcome set in stone that she was resisting futilely, and sometimes, like right then, she didn't want to resist at all…

Leia trembled.

"If you remember to leave the ramp down," she whispered, clutching his borrowed shirt against her chest. "Goodnight."

Han let her retreat into the crew quarters without another word.

XXX

When Leia was finally curled onto her usual bunk in the crew quarters, snuggled under the blankets in Han's old shirt, the awful cold grief from earlier in the night had vanished, driven away by a hot, smoldering ache in every part of her body that Leia had recently realized was _want_. And not just any want, but a want for Han and Han alone, a sensation that had simmered almost unnoticed in the first several weeks after the Death Star but that had become overwhelming before she'd even really built up her defense. She finally found sleep lulled by the familiar sound of the Falcon's environmental control, the scent of Han in her every breath. How easily he'd soothed her distressed thoughts, seemingly without even trying…

Leia had no more nightmares that night.

She didn't know, and Han didn't tell her, that he'd woken in the early hours of the morning from his own erotic imaginings of her to the silhouette of a man standing before his bunk, and in his sleep addled mind Han was certain that he heard the specter say, in words soft as moonlight,

 _"Protect her."_


End file.
